Modern artists

One of the first artists featured in Sarah Thornton’s fascinating 33 Artists in 3 Acts is American Jeff Koons, who tells her that he never wants people to feel small when they view his art. Clearly Thornton ascribes to a similar principle. In this witty, smart follow-up to her 2008 bestseller, Seven Days in the Art World, Thornton generously cracks the sometimes perplexing code of modern art.

Behind the art world's most famous face

Leonardo da Vinci was an outlier in so many ways: a peripatetic polymath, handsome, unmarried, an innovator, unquestionably an artistic genius. He doesn’t typify his era any more than geniuses ever do. Leonardo was a party of one.

The subterfuge of a bestseller

This cloak-and-dagger account reveals the intriguing details of how the novel Doctor Zhivago came to be published during the height of the Cold War. Written by Russian poet Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago was kept under wraps by its author, who feared retribution from the Soviet government for the book’s critical portrayal of the 1917 Russian Revolution and its tepid treatment of socialism.

Feature by Alice Cary

Art and photography are wonderful windows to the world through which we are able to see things in new, often unexpected ways. These five books all contain intriguing stories about a variety of artistic visions and are certain to delight any lucky recipients this holiday season.You can’t help but cheer for Brandon Stanton, creator of Humans of New York, a book that has drawn lots of recent...

Feature by Pat Broeske

Forget visions of sugar plums. This holiday season, a roster of Hollywood-themed entries summon up lingering images from beloved movie classics, among them The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach and Wuthering Heights, as well as from kooky cult favorites, including TV’s wonderfully eccentric “Doctor Who.”Of course, some cult films go on to become classics. In development for a decade, A...

Feature by Cat Acree

This holiday season, make her laugh, make her cry or make her think. But certainly make her curl up with a great book.“High priestess of fashion” Diana Vreeland may have transformed Vogue into the bible of contemporary American style, but she is also known for her way with words. In Diana Vreeland Memos, Vreeland’s grandson Alexander has collected more than 250 memos and...

Feature by Robert Weibezahl

If you’re looking for something out of the ordinary for the bibliophiles on your list, here’s a collection of notable new releases that includes books about books, artwork made from books, a richly illustrated classic and more. Because books really do make the best gifts!The singular mind of Umberto Eco takes readers on a tour of fabled places in literature and folklore in The Book...

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

What a difference a year makes—or so suggests British critic Kevin Jackson in Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One. That was the year both James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land were published; after that, Jackson says, art and literature were never quite the same. But those tent poles of the modernist movement were not the only avant-garde artistic...

Letters to America's first literary superstar

According to Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers, Mark Twain was a "voracious pack rat." Among the abundance of artifacts he left behind are thousands of letters he received from people from all over the globe, of all ages and representing all facets of society. Lucky for us, Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen decided to take on the...